"What you’ve got is a race in which, for the first time in a long time, the Democrat is as well-known as the Republican at the outset of the race," Daron Shaw, co-director of the University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, said in a statement.

But Jim Henson, another poll co-director said in a statement, "These numbers are not evidence that the underlying fundamentals are changing in Texas. We have not seen a big change in party identification, and we don’t see any large-scale shifts in the underlying attitudes that are forming."
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Texas Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott leads Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis 40 percent to 34 percent among registered voters in their likely faceoff for governornext year, according to a poll from the University of Texas/Texas Tribune.
The poll found 25 percent of...